Docudramas about sensational crimes are good box office. So a Los Angeles production company hopes to make a TV movie about a grisly 1986 murder case in which 14-year-old Shaun Quillette was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by classmate Rod Matthews in Canton, Mass. Shaun's mother, Jeanne Quinn, is bitterly against a movie being made. Given TV's spotty record concerning accuracy in docudramas, her fear of Shaun being victimized a second time--by scriptwriters--is understandable.

Fox Broadcasting Co. is leaning toward making a counteroffer to the Walt Disney Co.'s bid for television rights to NHL games, in an effort to at least drive up the costs that its archrival will have to pay. Earlier this week, Disney made a $600-million bid for five years of exclusive coverage on its ABC broadcast network and its ESPN cable channels. The offer is nearly three times what Fox and ESPN pay under their current contracts with the NHL, which expire at the end of the 1998-99 season.

Yielding to complaints from broadcasters and some church leaders, Roman Catholic Church officials in Monterey on Thursday dropped a controversial plan to auction television rights for coverage of September's visit by Pope John Paul II. The Diocese of Monterey's offer to sell live coverage rights and favorable booth locations during the Pope's outdoor Mass had set off an uproar among broadcasters and unsettled national church leaders who are planning the Pope's nine-city tour.

NBC said Monday that it will not bid for U.S. television rights for the 1994 World Cup, the first world soccer championship to be played in the United States. Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, also predicted that ABC and CBS would decline to bid for rights to the monthlong tournament. "Given the ratings, I don't think anyone will go for it," Ebersol said while at Wimbledon to watch the tennis championships.

ABC has acquired the television rights to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and its first sequel from Warner Bros., in a deal estimated to be worth nearly $140million--an amount that could establish a new record, according to the companies and sources close to the deal. The Walt Disney Co.

The Mighty Ducks' first home game will be among 20 games that will be broadcast by KCAL-TV (Channel 9) during the team's first NHL season, the team and station announced Friday. The agreement, which also includes road games, had been long anticipated because KCAL is a Disney Co. cousin of the Mighty Ducks.

As expected, NBC will lose as much as $100 million on its broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, which conclude this weekend. But experts still foresee a bidding war for rights to the 1996 Games in Atlanta, with the participants including cable mogul Ted Turner. Experts say NBC's problems were exacerbated by its unsuccessful pay-per-view Triplecast, with sales reaching only 10% of projections.

Setting an Olympic record, NBC agreed Thursday to pay $401 million for U.S. television rights to the 1992 Summer Games at Barcelona, Spain--$101 million more than it spent for this year's Olympics at Seoul. The network immediately said that cable television will, for the first time, get a piece of the action, though specific plans for how it will sell some of its rights were not disclosed.

The Texas crime that Hollywood hasn't touched is a colorful, still hazy web of murder: the T. Cullen Davis murder case. The still talked-about murders happened in Ft. Worth on Aug. 2, 1976. A man dressed in black and wearing a woman's black wig invaded Cullen Davis' hilltop mansion, gunning down four persons, killing two of them. The two survivors of the midnight shootings identified the gunman as Davis--then one of the wealthiest men in America.

President Reagan, intensifying the debate over whether the nation's broadcasters must present opposing views of controversial issues, has vetoed legislation to turn into law the 38-year-old "fairness doctrine," the White House announced Saturday. The doctrine, instituted by the Federal Communications Commission as public policy in 1949, requires the nation's radio and television stations to "afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance."